Tag / microsoft

Google Glass has returned — as Glass Enterprise Edition. The company’s website suggests that it can be used in professional settings–such as manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare — for specific work applications, such as accessing training videos, annotated images, handsfree checklists, or sharing your viewpoint with an expert collaborator. This is a very different imagined future with Glass than in the 2012 “One Day” concept video where a dude walks around New York City taking pictures and petting dogs. In fact, the idea of using this type of product in a professional working space, collaborating with experts from your point of view sounds a lot like the original Microsoft HoloLens concept video (mirror).

This is not to say one company followed or copied another (and in fact Hololens’ more augmented-reality-like interface and Glass’ more heads-up-display-like interface will likely be used for different types of applications. It is, however, a great example of how a product’s creepiness is partly related to whether it’s envisioned as a device to be used in constrained contexts or not. In a great opening line which I think sums this well, Levi Sumagaysay at Silicon Beat says:

Now Google Glass is productive, not creepy.

As I’ve previously written with Deirdre Mulligan[open access version] about the future worlds imagined by the original video presentations of Glass and HoloLens, Glass’ original portrayal of being always-on (and potentially always recording), invisible to others, taking information from one social context and using it in another, used in public spaces, made it easier to see it as a creepy and privacy-infringing device. (It didn’t help that the first Glass video also only showed the viewpoint of a single imagined user, a 20-something-year-old white man). Its goal seemed to be to capture information about a person’s entire life — from riding the subway to getting coffee with friends, to shopping, to going on dates. And a lot of people reacted negatively to Glass’ initial explorer edition, with Glass bans in some bars and restaurants, campaigns against it, and the rise of the colloquial term “glasshole.” In contrast, HoloLens was depicted as a very visible and very bulky device that can be easily seen, and its use was limited to a few familiar, specific places and contexts — at work or at home, so it’s not portrayed as a device that could record anything at any time. Notably, the HoloLens video also avoided showing the device in public spaces. HoloLens was also presented as a productivity tool to help complete specific tasks in new ways (such as CAD, helping someone complete a task by sharing their point of view, and the ever exciting file sharing), rather than a device that could capture everything about a user’s life. And there were few public displays of concern over privacy. (If you’re interested in more, I have another blog entry with more detail).

Whether explicit or implicit, the presentation of Glass Enterprise Edition seems to recognize some of the lessons about constraining the use of such an expansive set of capabilities to particular contexts and roles. Using Glass’ sensing, recording, sharing, and display capabilities within the confines of professionals doing manufacturing, healthcare, or other work on the whole helps position the device as something that will not violate people’s privacy in public spaces. (Though it is perhaps still to be seen what types of privacy problems related to Glass will emerge in workplaces, and how those might be addressed through design, use rules, training, an so forth). What is perhaps more broadly interesting is how the same technology can take on different meanings with regards to privacy based on how it’s situated, used, and imagined within particular contexts and assemblages.